'Greater India' was a transimperial, Indocentric research paradigm that informed the colonial recovery of the ancient past in Central and Southeast Asia. Ancient India was postulated as the fount of an expansive classicism – an actor in world history on a par with ancient Greece and Rome. Under the Greater India movement, the scholarly quest for 'India in Asia' became tied to anti-colonial, pedagogical, nationalist and Asianist agendas. Yet although it provided a potent anti-colonial imaginary, the movement also bolstered visions of Indian exceptionalism and energized Hindu nationalist ideas of India as a civilizing, colonizing power. Speaking directly to debates that define and divide India today, this is essential reading for those interested in the legacies of Orientalist scholarship and interwar visions of Indian internationalism. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Winner, 2024 Humanities Book Prize, European Association for Southeast Asian Studies

‘This is a landmark study of an influential vision of history that continues to shape debates to this day. It is also a fascinating tale of intellectual collusions across Eurasia as a whole.’

Nile Green - author of How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding

‘Weaving in the history of ideas with that of an elite transnational network of Dutch, French, and Indian intellectuals, all invested in India’s past for diverse reasons, Spoelder unpacks an imaginary - Greater India - that, in restoring India to the centre of world history, often sought to justify Indian power and leadership in the present. A superb book that turns the idea of India inside out, and rethinks our understanding of Indian exceptionalism.’

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard - Associate Professor, King’s College London

‘By considering in a global history the knowledge produced about the Indian world at the crossroads of the European colonial empires that divided Asia, Yorim Spoelder contributes to decompartmentalizing Orientalist studies too often limited to a national framework … We will get … a great benefit from the meticulous historiographical study that Yorim Spoelder is developing in order to take the measure of this nationalist construction of an Indo-Buddhist Greater India whose imagination continues to feed the dreams of power of a Hindu nationalism that is still alive.’

Roland Lardinois Source: La vie des idées

‘Visions of Greater India is a compelling treatise on the way hypotheses and theories about the past get internalized as narratives of national pride in the present. The example of India as 'great' - geographically, spiritually, and culturally - is a case in point and is likely to become a model for analyses of how other nation-states construe their greatness.’

Soni Wadhwa Source: Asian Review of Books